This invention relates to ultrasound imaging systems, and in particular to improved methods for reduced speckle imaging.
Speckle may be reduced with spatial compounding. Alternatively, data representing adjacent spatial regions in a two-dimensional image may be filtered. However, the filtering reduces resolution.
Frequency compounding may be performed to reduce speckle. Frequency compounding comprises combining data associated with one frequency with data associated with another frequency. Typically, the frequencies associated with the data correspond to transmitted frequencies. However, frequency compounding may not efficiently take advantage of other system processing.
Ultrasound systems may be designed to generate images as a function of harmonic echo information. The harmonic echo information may provide improved image resolution, but may still have speckle artifacts.